The Motion Demon Read Free

badly. For many months Christopher Grot was laid up with malignant fever in a field hospital. Afterwards, he returned to civilian life a broken man. He abandoned his old ideas, his revolutionary concepts, his plans of conquest: he became an engine driver. He sensed the compromise, he understood the travesty, but he had no more strength left; he was content to deal in miniature. Soon the substitute ideal completely replaced the original one, covering with its narrow, dull framework the previously wide horizon: he now conquered space on a new, smaller scale. But he had entreated the railway authorities for only express rides—he never drove ordinary trains. In this manner, gaining in this terrain, he at least came closer to the original concept. He was intoxicated with a wild ride on far-spanning lines, dazed by the conquest of considerable distances within a short period of time.
    But he could not stand return journeys; he detested the so-called tour-retour trips. Grot only liked speeding on to what was ahead of him—he loathed any repetitions. That is why he preferred to return to the inevitable point of departure by roundabout routes, by a line circular or elliptical, anything but the same one. He understood perfectly the deficiency of curves that revert back to themselves, he felt the unethicalness of these continually inbred roads, but was saved by the appearance of progressive motion; he had the illusion, at least, that he was going forward.
    For Grot’s ideal was a frenzied ride in a straight line, without deviations, without circulations, a breathless, insane ride without stops, the whirling rush of the engine into the distant bluish mist, a winged run into infinity.
    Grot could not bear any type of goal. Since the time of his brother’s tragic death a particular psychic complex had developed within him: dread before any aim, before any type of end, any limit. With all his might he fell in love with the perpetuality of constantly going forward, the toil of reaching ahead. He detested the realization of goals; he trembled before the moment of their fulfilment in fear that, in that last crucial moment, a disappointment would overtake him, a cord would break, that he would tumble down into the abyss—as had Olek years ago.
    Because of this, the engine driver felt a natural dread of stations and pauses. Admittedly, he had few of them along his way, but they were always there, and one had to stop the train from time to time.
    Eventually a station became for him a symbol of a detested end, a formative materialization of planned goals, that cursed aim before which he was seized with repugnance and fear.
    The ideal line of track was broken down into a series of segments, each segment a closed unit from the point of departure to the point of arrival. A disappointing limitation arose, tight, banal in the fullest sense of the word: here—there. On the taut, wonderful projection into boundlessness there were dull junctions and stubborn kinks that spoiled momentum, tainted fury.
    For the time being he saw no help anywhere: from the nature of things a train had to halt once in a while at some loathsome stops.
    And when the contours of a station’s buildings appeared on the horizon, he fell into an indescribable dread and disgust; the hand raised over the crank would draw back involuntarily, and he would have to use the entire strength of his will not to pass the station.
    Finally, when his inner opposition grew to an unprecedented pitch, he came upon a happy idea: he decided to introduce a certain freedom to the range of the goal by moving its boundary points. Thanks to this, the concept of a station, losing a lot of its exactness, became something general, something lightly sketched and most elastic. This shifting of the boundaries granted a certain freedom of movement, it did not completely muzzle the brake. The stopping points, acquiring the character of fluidity, transformed the name of the station into a vague, cavalier,